Daniel Mason

reads from his magnificent new novel, The Winter Soldier, a sweeping, unforgettable love story of a young doctor and nurse at a remote field hospital in the First World War.

"I have been a Daniel Mason fan since The Piano Tuner. His abilities as a storyteller and a writer of the most gorgeous prose leave you wanting more. The Winter Soldier is a tour de force. I was immersed in the grandeur of Imperial Vienna and the frozen battlefields of the Eastern Front, and in this beautiful tale of love and war, and of our frailty and resilience in the face of both."--Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

To reserve your seat, please purchase a copy of The Winter Soldier by speaking to a bookseller or ordering via our website.

Thursday, September 20, 2018 - 7:30pm

Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives--at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains--he discovers a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled, and only a single mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains.
But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever.

 

From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front; from hardscrabble operating rooms to battlefields thundering with Cossack cavalry, The Winter Soldier is a story of war and medicine, of family, of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and finally, of the mistakes we make and the precious opportunities to atone.

Daniel Mason is a physician and author of the novels The Piano Tuner and A Far Country. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages and adapted for opera and theater. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, he is currently a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, where he teaches courses in the humanities and medicine. He lives in the Bay Area with his family.

Event address: 
2904 College Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94705
The Winter Soldier By Daniel Mason Cover Image
$28.00
Email or call for price
ISBN: 9780316477604
Published: Little, Brown and Company - September 11th, 2018